


Luminous Beings

by StellarRequiem



Series: Retcon of the Sith [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Darth Vader (Comics)
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Original canon, ROTJ canon, WE COULD HAVE HAD IT SO GOOD LUCAS WHY'D YOU CHANGE IT, anakin ACTUALLY acts like the kind of person who could become vader, by which I mean this is original canon consistent and is departing the prequel timeline radically, lengthy Luke-centric epilogue, prequel fix-it, slow transition from Jedi learner to Sith Lord, the "death" of Anakin Skywalker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-18 03:26:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 8,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5896303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The "death" of Anakin Skywalker and the birth of Darth Vader is a slow process in a universe in which Anakin is older, more cunning, and generally more like the kind of person who made Vader so formidable in the first place.</p><p>Based on the canon established by "Ben's Monologue" in the ROTJ script and novelization.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [homesickblues](https://archiveofourown.org/users/homesickblues/gifts).



* * *

 

He focused on Luke once again, and saw his son was crying. Yes that was it, he was tasting his boy’s grief— because he looked so horrible; because he was so horrible.

But he wanted to make it all right for Luke, he wanted Luke to know he wasn’t really ugly like this, not deep inside, not all together. With a little self-deprecatory smile, he shook his head at Luke, explaining away the unsightly beast his son saw. “Luminous beings are we, Luke— not this crude matter.”

Luke shook his head, too— to tell his father it was all right, to dismiss the old man’s shame, to tell him nothing mattered now. And everything— but he couldn’t talk.

\--James Kahn, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi

pg. 175 

* * *

 

“I want you to help me leave,” Padmé says with eerie serenity, a half-packed bag open on the table between them.

“The senate?”

“Not the senate. Anakin. I want you to help me leave him.” Her calm breaks by a fractional margin, so slight, and belayed by such a firm pursing of her lips, such a desperate clasping of her hands, that Obi-Wan concludes that the more respectful thing would be, perhaps, to say nothing of it.

“I’m surprised at you,” he says instead, playing the part she’s assigned him past the urge to let his jaw drop all the way through the floor.

“Don’t be. I am coming back the _second_ —” The second that _what,_ she doesn’t say, stopping herself and starting anew in an instant, “—but if Anakin knows, then Palpatine knows, and I no longer trust him.”

A small wonder. It would take a willful naivety—or, the dimmer corners of his mind offer, willful irreverence—to want to trust that man so soon after the highly suspicious loss of Master Windu.

“Good,” he tells her, “You shouldn’t. I don’t think that he’s what he appears to be, not with the influence he’s had on Anakin. It seems impossible, but if Master Yoda is correct...”

“Correct in what? What do you believe him to be?”

“ . . . a Sith.”

“Then I do have to go,” she affirms, her voice breaking across the hardened words. “If he knew . . .”

“ _Knew?_ ”

Padmé’s porcelain face cracks and splinters for a moment, and she swallows so hard he can see the movement in her throat, a quick duck-and-cover gesture beneath the skin.  She’s a good liar, good enough by far not to give herself away like this if some part of her didn’t want Obi-Wan to know.

That, or she’s more distraught than he realizes. He wonders, chastising himself for being so contentedly unperceptive, which it is. The feeling in the room says something like _both._

“—Nothing,” however, is all she’ll admit to. Obi-Wan sighs. He approaches her in slow, long steps, offering her a hand that she takes. They’ve known one another long enough now for such small gestures at the appropriate moments.

“Padmé.”

“I shouldn’t say,” she announces in a rush, her control over her own voice slipping, sliding away into shakiness as she squeezes his hand. “I haven’t even told him . . . In fact, I’ve hidden it, it’s terrible, but he’s been so strange lately and—”

“Told Anakin? Told him what?” She drops his hand. “What could you possibly have to—”

He stops. And he thinks. And he feels . . . and he swears. Albeit very quietly.

”. . . You’re pregnant,” he declares. “And Anakin is the father.”

For the first time, Padmé looks her defiant self, a little sharpness emerging from behind her soft veneer. She sets her mouth at a hard angle, raises frankly-appalled eyebrows.

“Of course he is,” she chides, voice still shaking beneath the condescending tone. “He’s my husband.”

_Maker spare us all._

“He—he’s— _what?!”_

“He never told you?” She looks so taken aback by his _not_ knowing, brown eyes alight, that for a moment she no longer seems shaken.

“Not about the _marriage_! What was he thinking?”

Padmé makes a small sound of disapproval in the back of her delicate throat, and shakes her head as she turns to move about the room. She disappears through the archway at the far end, returning with a bundle of clothes, speaking with careful, biting words all the while.

“He was thinking that the council had no right to rule his heart as well as his life, which I agree with. No one should have that much power over another person . . .” She shoves the bundle of clothing she’s holding into the bag with a vengeance. “Which is—which is exactly why he can’t know about the baby until someone brings him to his senses.”

_What senses? He’s chosen to serve a Sith._

Obi-Wan knows better than to say those words aloud in front of her, but the sentiment must show on his face, because hers hardens in an instant.

“Don’t tell me that it can’t be done,” she orders. “He’s still Ani. Nothing has been done that can’t be fixed; he just needs time, and the right reason. The second the baby is born, I’m coming back, and I’m taking him away with me.”

_Or whatever’s left of him._

“Return from where? If you go to Naboo—”

“Alderaan. Bail Organa is a close friend, and he and his wife have wanted to have a baby for some time. If they adopted one within the next few months, no one would be the wiser . . . “ there, her voice breaks entirely, and she hiccups once before regaining her ethereal , fragile composure, “should the worst happen.”

“That’s . . .  brilliant.” He chooses to compliment her rather than comment on the agony in her eyes. It’s what she wants. He can feel it, a pleading, pale light, a cold brightness that’s not chilling, but yearning to be warmed.

“Don’t act so surprised, Obi,” she retorts. If she sniffs a bit at the end, he chooses not to hear it for her sake.

>< 

Two days later, he helps her smuggle herself off the planet. It’s only then that she begins to sob, and only some time after she starts that she allows him to acknowledge it.

“Am I abandoning him?” she wails into her hand.

“No,” he consoles her, the feeling of _truth_ that swells behind the statement coming from somewhere so much greater than himself, “no, of course not. You’re saving him.”

For a moment there is silence between them except for her dress shifting in her quaking shoulders and the sound of her crying, muffled by her palms. Obi-Wan sets one cautious hand on her kneecap, kneeling on the floor before her so that she has no choice but to meet his eyes when hers emerge from behind her manicured fingers.

“Someday,” he assures her, when he knows that she’s listening, “he’ll understand that. I promise.”

Padmé only nods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note on the canon: In the novelization, the exact line describing how Padme and Anakin were separated is “When your father left, he didn’t know your mother was pregnant." So, it's arguable that Anakin is the one who ran off first, but it also suggests he may have eventually come back and discovered the pregnancy. So, I decided to let Padme show off her agency a little instead, and infer that Anakin is away somewhere, but not totally gone, hence HER leaving him.


	2. Chapter 2

Rage.

Possessive. Rage.

It takes over him with crawling determination, wrapping in and out of the patterns of his thoughts like a twining vine, invasive and unshakable.

She's gone.

She's left.

But she's his, his Padme, and she can't be. She can't have. Not when everything he's ever done has been, in some way hers. His, of course, but also hers. His freedom, her service. His position, her safety. His path, her hand to take through the shadows of something forbidden in a world of artificial, forced brilliance.

She can't be gone. She can't have left. He will make her come back. Make her stay. Make her love him, just as he had in the first place. He will _take_ her—

Palpatine finds his fury delectable.

“Well done," he coaches, “feel your rage. Let it consume you, and make you strong. This is what your Jedi would never teach—“

“Silence,” Anakin orders, such a thoughtless act. But he is lost in his rage. Using it to search wildly for the only thing he truly, wholly loves in a vast galaxy.

The reprimand is immediate.

Anakin’s windpipe crunches shut, and he collapses, gasping, to the floor despite himself.

“Now, young Skywalker,” Palpatine chastises him, “I could match your words to respond to such insolence, but I think I would prefer to match your other proclivities. In every case, you will find I can outdo you. Do not speak to me that way again. Unlike your Jedi, you will find I teach discipline through demonstration. Is that clear?”

Anakin contemplates, for a moment, taking hold of his palpable rage and striking the old man backwards through the window behind him. And the chancellor smiles, as if he could read the thought. And crushes Anakin’s neck until lack of blood as well as oxygen blur his brain, leaving him a little intoxicated, a little dazed. And it returns him to his senses, if not to calm: quelling the swell of irrational, directionless hate he’d been riding and returning his perspective once more to one of respect. Of need.  If there is any way to find his errant wife, after all, it’s Palpatine.

Because the man is right. Anakin cannot match him for power. In any capacity. And he knows that. There are times, as he glimpses the Sith worldview in which the force is a weapon and a tool, in which power is absolute and the ebb and flow of life and death and chaos and passion is utilized and controlled, that he even revels in it.

_Forgive me. I was not in my place._

Palpatine hurtles him backwards, leaving him splayed on his back on the floor, heaving air through a now-raw windpipe.

“Say it,” he orders.

“Forgive me,” Anakin wheezes.

“I will do no such thing," Palpatine replies, “but I will help you find this troublesome bride of yours. Rest assured of that, young Skywalker. We will find her together.”

Anakin nods, still mostly unable to speak. _Yes, we will._


	3. Chapter 3

Padme goes into labor early, and he misses the whole of it. It’s three days before Obi-Wan can return from his latest rendezvous with what remains of the dismantled Jedi order. Though the temple at its heart remains, it does so under guard, with those members of the council who’d been present when the lockdown began still sequestered away inside. It’s through remote liaisons with shadowy intermediaries that he must meet with Master Yoda, the only other soul who knows both the whereabouts of Padmé Amidala, and the state of her. It’s him that senses the birth.

“Feel this, Skywalker must,” he warns, and Obi-Wan’s heart sinks deep in his chest.

>< 

Obi-Wan returns to her side, sequestered in the quiet Alderaanian countryside, to find her cradling not one, but _two_ tiny, tiny infants with round red faces and large eyes, the girl’s brown, like her mother’s. The boys are as bright as the sky over the desert, as twin suns.

“Anakin’s eyes,” Padmé remarks, the words forcibly curt. Her throat tightens over them. She looks exhausted, purple circles beneath her dark eyes, curls coming loose from her braid.

“He should have been here. I am sorry, Padmé.”

She shakes her head. Lank curls bounce.

“Someday he’ll see them,” she says. “I know he will.”

Obi-Wan says nothing. He can’t speak to whether he shares her hopes—not when Anakin has been credited, since his appointment as Chancellor Palpatine’s personal guard, with having executed the trade federation viceroys . . . of having become more assassin, more murderer, than Jedi. _Jedi,_ who, rumor has it, he’s since been sent to hunt down and apprehend. Or kill, if they resist. Which they all will. Which he must know, they all will.

But all Obi-Wan responds with is “what are their names?”

Padmé smiles down at the babies in her arms, wrapped all in white.

“Leia and Luke,” she says.

“They’re beautiful.”

There is silence except for the small movements of the babies—one of which, Luke, Padmé passes to Obi-Wan so that she might adjust his sister against her breast—for a long time. Obi-Wan can hardly stand to break it, though it must be done.

“He’ll have sensed this, Padmé.”

She closes her eyes, lashes falling like curtains across the purple beneath.

“I know.”

“We have to move you and the babies as soon as possible, and create whatever illusion we can that he has nothing left to find, or he will never stop looking for you. I’m doing everything I can to disguise where you’ve gone, but it won’t be enough for long. He _will_ run out of Jedi to hunt. Soon you’ll be all that’s left.”

She _must_ know what he’s proposing, and her very much expects her to argue. But she doesn’t. She looks down at Leia, bigger than her brother and still so small, and says again, “I know.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

How he doesn’t feel it, he doesn’t know. It’s three days before the news reaches him.

Her shuttle was attacked. An imperial shuttle, boarded on Alderaan and destined for a ship that would have taken her back to the one place she must have known he would find her. Home, to Naboo. Where the wedding was. _But her shuttle was attacked._ Destroyed by the last remnants of the separatists, several of whom he has been sent to the outer rim to arrest, and Padmé, his Padmé, is gone.

_No._

He’s screaming it, on his knees in the dust of this backwater world, screaming the thought in a voice ragged and sharp,  that cuts itself to ribbons as he shouts, breaking and cracking until it fizzles into silence and fury warms his face beneath the tears. And then there is only the sound of the lightsaber. The hiss and hum and the molten crackling of the rock formations around his landing zone, and the sizzling of his gear as he cuts through everything before him, pain numbing to rage. To desperate rage, for his weakness. Weakness, because he is too selfish to turn the saber around and drive it through himself, for his failure, because couldn’t save her. He couldn't save his mother, and couldn’t save her.

He drops the lightsaber before he can bring it down on his ship, and slams his fists into its hull instead, so hard he feels bones crack. Once, and again. And again, until the pain becomes a kind of meditation, and in the agony he glimpses something potent and serene.

 _“Use your hate,”_ Palpatine has always told him.  But this is not useful. This will not save her.  This will not correct what’s been done. To punish it is the only thing left.

That knowing solidifies the cold that’s been growing in his heart, as vast and awesome as void, as the empty stars.

For the separatists he was sent for, there is no arrest. Only a massacre.


	5. Chapter 5

The rebel Jedi he chases through the galaxy, those not sequestered in the temple, die with honor for all the good that does them.

Anakin is the one that kills them. It’s his duty, in the face of their betrayal. The chaos their resistance represents. And so he has become not a guardian, but an enforcer. The right hand of the maker, a thing to be feared. _A dark Jedi,_ people even whisper. A term not heard in eons. And he basks in the fear that paints the words. The respect. The power of it. He cannot restore what has been taken, but he can control what is left, and he accepts their lowered eyes and the backbreaking bows that people offer him and finds he is almost _satisfied_ somewhere beneath the rage that eats at him, the loss that colors his insides black and corrodes his heart with every passing minute of this new world in which Padmé is no longer his. That she no longer is.

>< 

Padmé honors her “death” by hiding in plain sight. As Alderaan’s royalty announce the adoption of a new baby girl, as crowds cheer for their new princess, she and Obi-Wan watch from the wings under the guises of a cloaked advisor and a simple nursemaid with a baby of her own in her arms. She will watch Leia grow from this position, claiming only Luke has hers, though Breha Organa has tried to console her by declaring that the girl will simply have two mothers instead of one: One a queen, and one a secret. In Obi-Wan’s mind, things have gone as well as they could have hoped.

But Padmé, beside him, has glistening eyes despite her stalwart expression, and a gaze far away, as if she is watching a funeral other than her own. As if she knows.

It is in that moment that Obi-Wan feels it, the great disturbance of so many voices crying out at once: and as he trips backward, leaning against the wall behind him for support, Padmé clutches Luke a little closer to her chest, and closes her watering eyes.

>< 

The order that ends the Jedi is numbered _66,_ and the clone troopers follow it as if possessed. Anakin is with them when they turn on the temple they’ve been securing. He oversees it. Evidence has come to light, they have been told, of a plot constructed by the supposedly peaceful Jedi still under arrest there. A rebellious, murderous betrayal previously limited to those strays who had run, who had chosen to fight inevitability, and to die at Anakin’s hand.

The Jedi in the temple call him a traitor as they storm it.

He says the same to them.

They die by lightsaber and blaster and overwhelming force, hundreds of them, wave after wave of different species and genders of people all with the same belief in a light that cannot save them. That has never saved anyone. That has never been enough.

On the last level are the younglings. The oldest of them, teenagers of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, come at their pursuers with lightsabers, and Anakin helps to cut them down. Lost causes, they cannot be retaught, or turned. Cannot be salvaged from the brainwashing of the Jedi order. He’d once called them child soldiers, he recalls. He’d been talking to Obi-Wan. He’d been right. The proof lies dead on the ground before him.

The youngest of them are in the room beyond. _They,_ he knows, are unarmed. _They,_ he knows, are young, Malleable. Can be shown reason, and can be saved by order. By the _truth_ that the world is not the simple place the Jedi showed them, that there is often victory in darkness, something admirable in the ability to invoke fear, something potent in hate and passion and rage and love and all the feelings they have been forbidden. Something precious in family and home and marriage and all of those things they’ve been denied. That devotion to the Force, if it is _really_ devotion, is not about restraint, but experience; about is movement through a person, through a world or the stars.

The youngest of them, he can use. The youngest of them, he has every intention to spare.

And then the troopers open the door, and open fire.

There is the hot whistling of blaster fire, and short, startled, whimpering screams cut short. And then there is silence except for the hard sound of armor hitting walls. Anakin sweeps the troopers aside, slamming them in every direction, deflecting the stray shots that go off as they impact walls and furniture and windows. He lifts their captain into the air bodily, a hand—via the Force—closed over his throat.

The captain drops his blaster and claws at his collar. The other troopers, dumbfounded, outranked, only watch.

“What is this?” Anakin demands. The trooper chokes.

“Orders---orders—all—were . . . all--”

“Your orders were to kill them all under _my_ supervision.  And I gave you no order to kill those children.”

“I’m—My _lord—_ “

“I am no lord,” Anakin spits, and closes his suspended fist. The captain drops in a heap of flesh and armor to the floor, the indents of Anakin’s fingers still apparent on his broken throat in the form of the crushed collar of his armor.

Anakin wheels to face the room at large.

“Understand this,” he says, “when you are in my presence, you answer to me. And _I_ do not accept failure. I do not accept insubordination. You have been warned.”

The chorus that answers him says “yes sir _._ ”

>><< 

As the exit the temple, Anakin stops to look up through its darkened windows. He can feel the _death_ coming from the top floor, and from _himself._  And he thinks, for a moment of internal collapse, _What have I done?_

He can already hear Palpatine’s answer in his head: _“What you had to do.”_

In time, perhaps, he’ll come to see how that is true.


	6. Chapter 6

For four years, Obi-Wan will watch from a distance, forever one step ahead, as Anakin murders Jedi—and others—without even the pretense or arrest of the necessity of resistance, but it is after only eight months that Master Yoda is able to convince him of what more must be done.

“If discovered they are, no protecting them will there be. No legacy, will Skywalker have.”

“You’re assuming these children—”

“The answer to their fathers crimes, they must be!” Master Yoda says _must_ as if he knows some terrible truth that Obi-Wan has not yet seen. “No other is there.”

“I agree that we must keep the children from him, Master, but surely there is some other way.”

Yoda shakes his head.

“None,” he says, “that I can see. Separated, the Skywalkers _must_ be.”

>><< 

“ _No,_ ” she says. “Absolutely not.”

“Padmé please, you must see reason—”

“NO. I refuse to believe that there isn’t another way. They’re safe together.”

“Not if Anakin senses them--”

“Anakin would never let someone hurt his children.”

She’s right, of course. If anything could call Anakin to his senses, it would be protecting the babies. _If._

“He couldn’t stop the Chancellor if that was what he wanted. Padmé, I know you don’t want to hear this. But it is temporary and—”

 _And someone must take up the destiny that Anakin abandoned._ Become the Jedi that Obi-Wan had always _felt_ he was meant to be, the Jedi with a connection to the Force as easy as breathing, as pure and unrelenting as the passage of light from sun to planet. As transcendent as the blur of the stars before the jump to hyperspace. _Someone must balance what he’s done._

But he doesn’t dare to add that. Padmé has already heard enough of him.

“No, Obi—listen to me There _has_ to be something.”

“I told Master Yoda the same thing, but _think_ : whatever path we choose, of all of them, is the safest way. And if we don’t want to lose the opportunity, we must act quickly. Let me take Luke to Tatooine. If there is a better option that presents itself, I will bring him back to you immediately but we must do what we can to prevent the worst case scenario—“

“No,” she says, voice like stone, delicate features carved of some rich, unrelenting metal the color of white Naboo sands, “I planned for the worst already by coming here.  _Breha Organa is raising my daughter.”_

“But Padmé, for their _safety—”_

For the future, if Master Yoda is right.

Padme’s frozen features fracture into an almost-snarl, and she clutches Luke closer to her chest. She looks regal, in her anger and her horror over what Obi-Wan has suggested; very much like the queen and statesman and strategist that he both knows her to be and is relying on her to be. Surely, that part of her must see sense.

“I’ve lost my husband, Obi, I can’t  lose my son  the way. I will not--I will not . . .”

She falters, looking down at Luke, and closes her eyes. She breathes, deep, shaky inhalations, full of resentment and pain, pulling in the infants scent for long moments at a time. Obi-Wan says nothing. _Patience,_ he has always been told. _Have patience._ He finds it easy, now, asking so much of her. But she is rational. And she will protect her children. He knows her too well to expect otherwise.

Finally, she speaks.

“. . . I want him back, Obi.”

“One thing at a time—“

“I don’t mean Anakin . . . I--” her voice shivers as she speaks. Her stone features crumble. “Take Luke. to Tatooine, just for a _little while_ —”

The shiver in her voice becomes a pervasive, constant quaking.

“It _is_ a temporary precaution, Padme.”

“And Breha—will treat Leia--she’ll be like her daughter and I’ll—I’ll stay on Aldaraan. If he is—watching me—he would—notice—if—I left.”

Her plan comes out like that, in heaving, sobbing increments as her voice, like her expression, begins to crack as she surrenders to reason. _But she’ will do it._ She’ll stay with Leia, as the little princess’ nursemaid. And Luke . . .

 _Luke_ he swears before her and the Force he will protect. But the realization of what she has done, what she has just agreed to, is overcoming her now, and she pays him no attention as he makes his promise. Obi-Wan struggles in low tones to console her, laying a hand on her bird-boned shoulder.

“That’s good. Padme, thank you. I promise no harm will come to him. I won’t let him out of my sight until he’s safely back with his mother.”

Because he will come back to her. He _must._

Padmé doesn't even feel him. She’s  truly crying now, harder than ever, her beautiful, brazen face turning twisted and ugly and scrunched and red, her forehead pressed with delicate, desperate pressure against her baby’s soft, barely-present hair. Luke squirms in his mother’s arms. One tiny hand reaches out and clenches the air, summoning some invisible source of consolation that won’t come before finding his mother’s ruddy porcelain face. He knits tiny, pudgy fingers into a lose curl of her hair, pulling hard for a moment in his half-sleep before his soft little arm disappears again into the blanket he’s wrapped in.

“I’ll see you again,” Padme is whispering, over and over again. “I’ll swear I’ll see you again.”


	7. Chapter 7

Obi-Wan stays on Tatooine for most of the next four years.  He stays away from the family, watching from afar Luke’s progression from fragile, pudgy infant to small, toddling terror—wandering away to the best of his short legs’ ability just as soon as he can walk, squawking back at the droids around the farm at the top of his voice while the droids in question are working—to a slightly larger, more articulate toddling terror.

He learns even from a distant that Luke is an uncommonly fast learner, adventurous and restless and hyperactive, but quiet. He waits to talk until something inspires him enough to warrant it, and when he finally speak, his first word is not auntie, nor uncle, but _ship._ Or something at least equivalent, in toddler speak, to that word.

Padmé laughs when Obi-Wan tells her that, causing her hologram to shiver. Leia’s, she says, was _Dada._ She smiles about it, though her eyes are sad, even in the hologram. She looks much thinner than Obi-Wan remembers, her bones standing out at sharp angles above her hollow cheeks. She looks even thinner, almost skeletal, as she frowns.

“We’re seeing more Stormtroopers on Alderaan,” she says. “I fear Anakin will follow. I can only stay out of sight for so long without drawing attention to myself, and I . . . Leia looks so much like me, Obi. We can’t stand next to each other in front of him and expect him not to know.”

“Perhaps it would be best if you left for a while.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head so hard a limp curl comes loose, “if Palpatine is watching that will only alert him that there’s something here for me to hide. And I do think . . .”

“What is it?”

When next she speaks it’s nearly a whisper.

“I think he’s found me. I don’t think he’s told Anakin, but I feel . . . it’s like there’s someone just behind me. And Obi, I’m so _cold_ all the time. The way Anakin used to make me feel sometimes, at the end.”

“Like you’re freezing from the inside . . . ”

“Precisely.”

“But if the Emperor,” as Palpatine now calls himself despite his insistence that the senate still matters, “knows where you are, why hasn’t he come for you?”

She shakes her head again, slowly this time. Her expression is grim, dark shadows falling across her eyes as she lowers her head. They flicker on the hologram as she blinks.

“I don’t know. But I can _feel_ him. It’s like . . . it’s as if he’s waiting for something.”

“Perhaps for Anakin to find you.”

She lifts her head. He understands her answer though she looks suddenly to urgent to actually nod, and he knows he must do something he’s delayed for far too long. Obi-Wan steels himself, grinding his teeth for a moment before he answers.

“I’ll draw him off,” he says. “Of all the Jedi he’s hunted, surely I’m the one he’ll most want to catch.”

Padmé begins to answer, and falters. Her brows knit, and she bites into her lip.

“If he chases you, he _will_ catch you,” she says. “He doesn’t just let enemies go.” Anakin doesn’t let _anything_ go.

“I know.”

“You’ll have to face him.”

“I know.”

“He will try . . . he’ll try to kill you Obi. What will you do then?”

It’s Obi-Wan’s turn to falter, to stutter over his words,and remember Master Yoda’s. Patience. Forethought. Planning. He’s had to come to terms with these things as he’s learned to play the waiting game of watching Luke grow.

“Whatever I have to,” he finally answers, though he asks himself it could really be true. Surely he doesn’t have it in himself to murder a friend, even Anakin. Even in combat.

Then again, perhaps he shouldn’t be concerned with the prospect of defeating Anakin at all. From the sounds of what little reaches him on remote Tatooine, the growing influence of the dark side has made Anakin more dangerous, more deadly, than ever. Obi-Wan remembers as he was—cold and calculating and vivacious and brutal—and has to recall his self-control. For a moment, aside from the nausea he’s already feeling, he senses in himself a glimmer of what might even be fear. Anakin _could_ kill him. And what’s far worse is that he _would._

Padmé sits forward in her chair.

“Don’t say it like that,” she says. “I know what you’re implying.”

“He may force my hand, Padmé.”

“No. Please, Obi, don’t kill him. You mustn’t. Think of his children—he deserves to see them someday.”

“You really believe that’s still an option.”

“ _Yes,”_ she breathes, so quiet but so emphatic, “of course. There is still good in him. I know him too well not to believe that. He told me, once, that the Jedi warn against passion because it leads to fear and jealousy and hate. Is that true?”

“To put it in simple terms, yes.”

“And hate is the path to the dark side? It’s one of the ways that the . . .” she pauses, as if bracing herself to use a word that still feels strange to say it, surreal, “ _Sith_ gain power?”

“Absolutely.”

“In that case, Obi—I promise you this. If Anakin is drawing his strength from hate, after what he’s done, a great deal of it is what he feels for _himself_. He’s not heartless. He’s still _Anakin._ Appeal to that part of him, I’m begging you. _”_

Obi-Wan shakes his head.

“But that’s the horror of it,” he sighs. “He should know better. How he could fall so easily . . . I should have seen it.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she says, waving him off. Her holographic arm looks the size of a child’s as it moves towards him. “All that matters is what we do now. Promise me you won’t kill him. Promise me you will at least give him a chance to come back to the light. Tell him whatever you need to, but promise me, _promise me_ you will try to bring him home. He’s not gone, Obi. The answer to what he’s done is to save him, not destroy him. _Please.”_

 _He won’t give me a choice,_ he wants to say. _I can’t risk you and the children._ But there is something that he’d learned, in the temple and at war: the truth is not always constructive. Not in its plainest form. There is what can be done, and what must be done for grander strategy. For the sake of preserving peace. So what he says to her, “I will do everything I know how to,” is not precisely a lie.

It might even be the truth, from a certain point of view—as when Anakin finally catches up to him on Mustafar, he _does_ speak to him as their lightsabers clash. As the heat of their blades blends with the horrid heat of the world around them.

“This isn’t you, Anakin!”

“It’s what I need to be,” he snarls. “It’s what I was meant to be.”

He says this, and very nearly cuts Obi-Wan in half.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: I wasn't able to add it in here, but according to the novelization, Luke's "uncle" Owen--the man putting up with Luke's terrible twos--is in fact Obi-Wan's brother. So, enjoy the idea that the man who's so reluctant to have Luke know anything about his father may very well be evidence not only of his concerns for Luke becoming like Anakin, but also evidence that Obi-Wan is in fact the family embarrassment for having run off to *whispers* become a JEDI, scandal scandal, in the first place.


	8. Chapter 8

The world of Mustafar is pockmarked with pits of molten material that have bubbled up from the river of lava in the gorge several hundred feet below. The incredible heat of that hellish flow is such that even heat resistant droids can approach it only briefly, and it is only the spectacular drop from the lip of the canyon on which Obi-Wan and Anakin clash that spares them from being roasted alive by the temperature of the air itself. 

The Anakin he battles is not the man Obi-Wan remembers. His long hair has been clipped in a hard, military style, close to his head, and the same rigidity exists in his expression. He snarls at Obi-Wan as he speaks, but fights with an almost impassive expression, with a hard set to his mouth and a slight furrow in his brow made vicious by the spark of rage in his eyes and the teeth-grinding clench of his jaw. His blue eyes, once as bright as sunlight, alive with the promise of the Force, now look more like the way stars appear through a starship viewscreen: hostile and dangerous. His is a righteous hate. Anakin’s rage is more blistering than the unrelenting air, and there is, he knows, no reason, no sense, left in it.

 _I’m sorry, Padmé,_ he thinks. The twins he excludes from this silent plea: it’s a blessing to them that they’ll never have to see what their father has become, that they never have to confront that this engine of rage is a part of where they come from. Better to be fatherless than to face this monstrous truth.

Obi-Wan  focuses more on keeping his feet than fighting back, desperate to stay standing, knowing that he is doomed if he falls, and he manages to lead Anakin—too unrelenting to care whether he kills Obi-Wan by backing him over the canyon’s edge or into one of the multitude of molten pits around them—away from the ledge and up the lip of one of the pits. Anakin comes around with a low blow to his side, where he knows Obi-Wan’s defense tends to be weakest.

To do it, he lets just one foot step over the crest of the pit, settling on the side that slopes down into the pool of superheated material below. His stance is good, solid. There is no way for Obi-Wan to take advantage of it that doesn’t meant taking a hit of his own. But it’s also a moment of overconfidence—so characteristic of this man who he’d once loved—that he knows, that he feels with a settling, saddening certainty, is the only chance he has.

Anakin will _not_ kill him. Not today.

Taking a glancing blow to his shoulder that sears him as it cuts, Obi-Wan ducks below the incoming blade of Anakin’s lightsaber, collapses to the blistering ground, plants his hands to brace himself, and _kicks._

>< 

The very air burns as Anakin fights, creeping up his scalp and fueling his rage. He sinks into the pain until it becomes a kind of warm and awful energy that he feels within as well as without, the Force potent and ready just beyond.  Like this, he can sense his Emperor’s attention even from lightyears away. Focused, worried, watchful eyes calling across the Force. Anakin doesn’t need their supervision.

Obi-wan is falling back already, climbing backward up the edge of one of the craters of lava that spackle the landscape of this retched world, and Anakin knows, with a rush of pride, that he is better than him. Anakin is stronger, faster, and though he has never been called anything but _learner_ , it is he that ought to win.

Ought to.

For a singular instant, Obi-Wan abandons his light, his morals, his fractured order, forgoing his clean tactics to lay a low blow against Anakin’s shins, and Anakin goes to his knees. As he does, he tumbles down the slope he kneels on, lunging for Obi-wan rather than trying to stop himself immediately; blind with pain and hate so hot that the results of his backwards slide, his trip into the pit on whose lip he’d stood, at first feels no different in its heat and intensity than what already exists inside of him. His response to what is happening to him is delayed, rage protecting him from the skin-stripping heat crawling up his back—

But rage and hate are not enough in the face of death to save him, and then there is only pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To give credit where it's due, "Crawling up his back--" is a line I pulled directly from the novelization. Many kudos to James Khan for bringing it into existence.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning to readers: This chapter's first section includes a rather graphic description of Anakin's burns that could be disturbing for some people. If you think it will bother you, you can skip to the first break (>>

Before Obi-Wan leaves Mustafar, shaking hands on the controls, another ship pings on his scanner. Imperial. What the ship hopes to find after what he’d done to Anakin, the fall he’d taken, and into—the _smell_ of him burning still hangs in Obi-Wan’s nose—he doesn’t know what they expect to salvage of, of—

What he in sudden, desperate grief had pulled out of the pit by one limp hand had been less than a corpse, so little left—

He makes the jump to hyperspace and lets the autopilot do the rest, his face falling into his hands.

He’d pulled Anakin out by one arm that had still been reaching for the edge, and the seared, blistered remains of his skin had slid from his muscle and come off on Obi-Wans palms—

He weeps.

Ignoring the wound on his arm, the stinging of the cool floor against the parts of his feet scalded when his boots finally burnt away, the ache of his skin everywhere it had been exposed to the ambient heat of the pit, he weeps. Weeps as he hadn’t been able to, too overcome with shock, when he’d pulled Anakin out and rolled him over to look down into what was left of his face.

His head hadn’t quite gone under before Obi-Wan got to him, and though a long line of skin along his left cheek had burnt away along with the near entirety of the back of his scalp, he’d still had a face. Open eyes, gone utterly blank. Lifeless between blistered lids. His parted lips had blistered to three times their size. Open, still, over a shout. The sound is still ringing in Obi-Wan’s head when he drops out of hyperspace above Alderaan.

>><< 

Padmé knows before he speaks, rushing to his side as he limps out of the ship.

“You’re . . . burnt,” she says, half a shout as she snakes herself under his arm, pulling his weight onto her frail frame. She looks far worse in person than she had on the holograms, deep circles beneath her eyes giving her the affect of a skeleton. Her lips are pale and chapped, and her skin is just slightly sallow, as if she’s been physically ill.

“Mustafar,” he manages to answer her as he collapses against her weakened body, “Padmé—I am--”

She’s weeping already, silently.

“I felt it,” she whispers. “Somehow. I know. I—I know.”

“I couldn’t save him. I couldn’t _save_ him . . .”

She stops helping him to walk and comes around in front of him, throwing her arms up so that they fall across his shoulders. She shakes a little as she cries. Obi-Wan buries his face in her bony shoulder and holds her against his chest as if it could resolve anything, as if her grief could make him feel any more forgivable. It was his pride, he now knows, that did this. His insistence. His training. His offer to make Anakin powerful when he should have left him in peace. _This_ is what that pride has earned him.

“There’s nothing left of him,” he whispers. “There was nothing left. He was like a machine, so full of hate . . .”

“Don’t say that,” Padmé chokes. “There must be some redemption for him. I know it, I know—I—”

She chokes again.

. . . And again.

She falls away from Obi-Wan, now too startled to cry, her eyes drying and widening all at once as she gags, one hand flying to her throat, one to her chest. She clutches at her heart as her breath turns to shallow wheezing, and her eyes roll back in her head.

“Padmé!”

She faints. He rushes forward to catch her just before her head impacts the ground.

“Padmé!” he calls again, and she blinks to wakefulness for a moment, bleary-eyed with her pupils dilated so far that he fears the evening light of the landing pad will blind her.

“It’s,” she wheezes, she gasps, lids fluttering, “him. It’s—”

She sucks in a wild, death-throe kind of gasp that aches and resonates in Obi-Wan’s chest, so full of sorrow and conflict as her eyes glaze over, fixed on something only she can see.

“Oh, _Ani—”_

And then she faints away completely.

By the time someone responds to his shouting, he’s already laid her out on her back with his mouth pressed over hers to force breath into her lungs, because her own breathing has stuttered to a stop. Her lips are still blue when they pull him off of her.

He thinks he can sense it as her heartbeat slows.

>< 

Anakin comes to and it hurts, it all hurts, and his skin, if he still has skin, it’s—

He’s knitting new skin, he thinks, based on the type of equipment in the room.

The droids who are reconstructing him aren’t using anesthetic. He reaches out to shred them, to take hold of their metal bodies with the force and—

He can’t.

He can’t conduct what he needs to. Can’t _feel_ what he needs to. His limbs are nonresponsive as if gone, as if replaced by the ghosts of themselves, the core of his body reeks of something burning and synth skin, and though he can’t lift his head to check, he wonders if his chest cavity is even there. The splintering agony that’s all he can feel suggests an image in his mind of his heart beating against open air.

He can’t touch the Force like this. His locus of control has shrunk and the only aspects of it that will answer to him are lightless and flighty, pecking at him like a flock of birds.

He moves the stumps of limbs that don’t respond, that he can’t feel, crying out and struggling to get away, to make it stop, until a suffocating presence holds him down. It makes his pulse race in his ears, as if he’s just been enclosed in some small, reverberating space. As if his heart has suddenly taken up residence in his head.

He can hear his pulse, little by little, speeding up.


	10. Chapter 10

Padmé Amidala dies in Obi-Wan’s arms, the light and life sucked out of her from afar.

Master Yoda will council him to let go of both his grief and his failure, more concerned for what he believes—despite its seeming impossibility—her death to have bought: a monster.

A machine.

>< 

Anakin’s rebirth begins with the Emperor’s voice, somewhere in the ambient distance, telling him to learn from this pain, to let it feed his rage. Then, perhaps he’ll stay in one piece, next time.

“Tell me, did you really think you were strong enough to face him?” the Emperor asks, a disparaging tone coloring his voice.

Anakin, the droids still stabbing at him, piecing him together, tries to answer only to release a scream.

The Emperor sighs.

“You must learn patience,” he chastises him. “You could have been so powerful, could have been victorious . . . If only there had been a teacher you could accept . . .”

 “Kill me—”

“Kill you? No, no—what a waste of effort that would be. I’ve only just brought you back.”

 _Back . . . back—_ He struggles to understand how this could be true, and why. To understand his value. His potential. He can’t comprehend it. He is _nothing_ , nothing more now than pain, and rage, and vengeance, and loss, and these things possess nothing. They maintain nothing.

And yet he is being offered training, and life . . . and power. And power possesses. Power keeps. Power is _something_. And it suits him. His Ambition. Defiance. Excellence. Pride.

A glimpse of reasoning splinters its way into the forefront of his mind. A moment of sense, clean and clear and razor-sharp.

“Teach me,” he gasps.

“I cannot teach a Jedi.”

 “I am no Jedi.”

Anakin spits the words, and his new master laughs as the energy the effort takes from him sends him toward oblivion.

 


	11. Chapter 11

When he wakes again, the pain is no less. It’s new pain, attacking new parts of what remains of his organic body, but it’s still _pain_ ; raw and unrelenting and pure. _Learn from it,_ he reminds himself. And it gives him the strength to stand.

His feet are heavy underneath him, and his chest feels pressurized by the weight of the respirator stabbing at what’s left of his lungs. He can feel where the tube between them and his raw esophagus connects, like a tickle in his throat. As he stands, the life-support belt at his waist sinks into the pull of gravity, and the stints running from it to his still-functioning organs tear at his abdomen so unrelentingly that he struggles to conceive of how he will stand to take a step, to flex his reinforced, weighty new muscle when the motion will surely turn mere pain to agony.

He inches one foot forward, and lurches. This new body is too heavy, too bulky, reinforced and unreal, it feels like a blockade between his organic self and the world—between him and the Force. He can’t touch it, can’t make it help him in this state any more than he can control the way his body moves, the way it settles around the belt and its stints. His organs scream as he sways. His vision swims. The respirator forces him into rapid breathing, a cadence that betrays his struggle. Emerging from the shadows, his master frowns.

“Surely you can do better than this,” he says.

And he does.

Buckling his waist around the belt, around its stints and the way they pinch, forcing his heavy legs to bend, he kneels. And speaks. His voice feels week but emerges resonate and dangerous from his mask, reverberating and amplified in his ears.

“I will,” he says, “my master.” And the lord of the Sith smiles.

“Then rise, my apprentice." He does, and with this small success, he is christened.

The name he is given is _Vader_ , because _Anakin_ is dead.

* * *

 

END OF ACT III

 

* * *

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Credit where credit is due: I drew inspiration for parts of this chapter from the Darth Vader comics.

* * *

 

EPILOGUE

 

* * *

 

Darth Vader has failed. He _will_ know why.

The Death Star floats, broken, in space; what remains of it slowly dispersing above Yavin, giving the planet an ugly new ring made of the shattered remains of the Empire’s grandest weapon. The source of such disturbance. He’d felt what it could do. His connection to the Force has changed, but it _is_ still present, and he’d sensed the cry of Alderaan, and the shattering of the heart, the smaller death, of its captive princess—the dimming of her bright spark in the Force as she weakened beneath his restraining hand.

And he had sensed, too, the inevitability, the finality, of the Death Star’s destruction. He had denied it. He had fought it. But it had occurred despite him. He _failed._

And the pilot who’d defeated him will pay.

He sends bounty hunters—one of few available resources in a reeling Empire—to discover the pilot's identity. One brings him a name.

_Skywalker._

>><< 

The boy’s name is Luke. He is 22, nearly 23, now.

_So he flies like his father._

“Leave me,” he orders the bounty hunter. “We will discuss your payment later.”

He speaks without turning around. He is swimming, drowning in the passion that is supposed to be his strength, and he will not have a witness to this abysmal failure of his control. As the door whisks shut behind him, as the clomp of magboots fades, his fists close at his sides. The window before him cracks, splintering outward, radiating away from the force of his anger. His betrayal.

Surely, his master must have known.

>><< 

He will possess his son.

His master will not steal him again.

There is a rule, among the Sith: There are always two. A master, and an apprentice. It is the destiny of the apprentice to murder their master. Vader has long had the power to do so. What he has lacked is the will. He is an enforcer, not an emperor. And he has had no apprentice of his own he could desire.

But he has the impetus _now._

 _He will be mine,_ he thinks into the empty stars.

_It will all be mine._

>><< 

His master, in the comfort of his triumph, has learned hubris. And it has made him blind. Once, he had tested his apprentice. Had questioned his loyalty, and his identity, searching for Anakin in Lord Vader, testing whether he had truly learned wisdom. He does so no more. And it is so easy for Vader to begin a betrayal of his own.

Five innocuous words.

“If he could be turned . . .”

It is this that will bring him to Bespin.

>><< 

The boy doesn’t look anything like his mother, her resemblance shows only in his softness. The size of his restrained-anxiety eyes. But his father . . . Vader looks at him, and for the first time sees himself, as he was, though with a very different kind of confidence. Luke’s boldness is built on lies—

Perhaps it is time to rearrange it for him.

_“I am your father.”_

The words cause the boy nothing but agony. It’s strange, to see a passion so unlike rage in combination with a hate so strong Vader can feel it in his remaining bones. Luke doesn’t only hate, he _despises_. He’s horrified, not by the Empire, but by Vader himself. His own son.

Vader lets him fall, but does not let him die.

>><< 

On Endor, his son asks nothing of him but hope. He has very little to give. All he has now, though he masks it, is desperation. _Join me._

It is the only way. The only way—

“It is too late for me, son.”

“Then my father is truly dead.”

He says the words without malice, only cold resignation. And yet they cut almost deep enough to sever the rage that is all Vader’s strength has ever known.

 _But he_ will _turn . . ._

He must.

>><< 

Luke will kill the emperor—

No.  He mustn’t—

He will _try_ to kill _Vader,_ though he says he will not fight. It’s a choice he cannot be allowed to make . . . And there is a way, he feels, to force his hand. Luke’s love is his weakness. The only part of the boy that can be turned to ignoble hate, that can ignite his strength . . . his love, his love for . . .

Sister. _Sister._

That bright spark of a girl—

He should have recognized her mother’s eyes.

>><< 

Luke beats him back, and as his master smiles, he finally _knows._

Luke will not be stopped from killing him. He will _replace him._ He’ll become him, torn and broken and heavy.

_No—_

He’ll _become him._

The truth steals Vader’s will to fight.

>><< 

“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”

_I am no Jedi._

His boy is everything he is not, and it will be his undoing. Darth Sidious will kill him. If Vader does not, if he cannot—

He is bound to his master.

His son is screaming.

_He is calling for his father._

He is _dying._ In _agony._

Vader is bound—

_. . . No._

>><< 

“Help me take . . . this mask off.”

He wants to see him. He is going to _see_ him. His son, who will live, who will move on and again see day.  And he will give his opportunity to die in relative comfort, to keep breathing at least shallow breaths until he surrenders to his shorted heart, to do it.

For Luke, he will give everything.

 


End file.
